[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

SAN FRANCISCO, March 14, 2014 – Games with
social missions publisher, MiCMALi today announced a Kickstarter
for a project currently in development, titled
World Agent BRAC. In the strategic city-building game,
players will take on the role of loan manager for BRAC in
Bangladesh. Based on real-world poverty issues, and ultimately
guiding impoverished nations with microcredit education,
World Agent BRAC tasks players with helping build
successful communities in various slums, by giving microcredit
loans to deserving borrowers. As the town grows and loans are
repaid, players move up the BRAC corporate ladder. A portion of
game revenue will support microcredit education for other areas
including Africa and Latin America.

Slated for release in Q2 2014 on iOS, Android devices and PC,
World Agent BRAC is an entertaining way to learn about -
and financially support - poor communities from Asia to Africa.
With all of the strategy, engaging gameplay, and amazingly detailed
graphics of existing well-known games in the city-building genre,
World Agent BRAC also sneaks in some serious lessons in
microcredit. By loaning money to residents in game, players help
them launch skilled businesses like in the real world:
seamstresses, mechanics, farming, herding, food stores, shoe
making, and so forth.

“
World Agent BRAC will bring game players in first world
regions face-to-face with slum dwellers. With the extremely limited
knowledge and empathy that currently exists surrounding poverty in
foreign countries, that’s a huge deal,” said MiCMALi
founder Sakuya “Zak” Morimoto. “But we
didn’t come at this from an educational angle. The game is
designed to be fun. The fact that players can learn something and
help people along the way is virtually unrelated to the quality of
the gameplay experience.”

Working within the game’s variables, which change randomly
to affect clients’ lives, such as population, time, food,
water and electricity, players must strategize on both who to loan
money to, and how to make sure it gets repaid. Loan decisions are
based on a variety of factors, including loan amount, how the money
will be used, borrowers’ past history, and so on. Players
will monitor the success and failures of current customers,
providing support to defaulting borrowers through consultation,
group meetings, loan extensions and a purchase tool option that
gives players special abilities to save the deal.

"The global discussion on microfinance is largely academic,"
said Shameran Abed, Associate Director of BRAC Microfinance
Programme. "It’s difficult for many people to imagine what
it’s like to talk with potential clients every day and figure
out how a loan might benefit them.
World Agent BRAC is a great initiative to build a deeper
understanding of how microfinance really works and have greater
empathy for the clients like those that BRAC backs."

Money raised from the Kickstarter campaign will go
toward developing all the features, characters and detailed
settings in the game, including numerous events that will affect
gameplay, such as natural disasters, political demonstrations,
contagious diseases and traffic accidents. Stretch goals will go
toward MiCMALi’s next project, a game about and benefiting
victims of natural disasters. Backers of the Kickstarter campaign
will receive special incentives like early access to the game,
branded t-shirts, and a mention in the credits.

World Agent BRAC is a win-win-win. Support the project,
snag special backer rewards, enjoy the game and help real-world
impoverished countries build their economies:

MiCMALi is a for-profit corporation founded in 2013 by Zak
Morimoto and NPO, Alliance Forum Foundation. Headquartered in San
Francisco, CA, MiCMALi’s mission is to build a platform where
people who are fighting adversities and people who want to support
them can share their experience and perspective, and create empathy
between them.MiCMALi publishes "GAMES with SOCIAL MISSIONS" to
various platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac OS.
These games provide players an engaging experience of participating
in the drama of people who fight development issues, such as
poverty or malnutrition, and the joy of contributing directly to
the alleviation of those plights. Learn more at
http://micmali.com/.

About BRAC

BRAC is a development success story, spreading solutions born in
Bangladesh to 11 other countries around the world – a global
leader in creating opportunity for the world’s poor. What
started out as a limited relief operation in 1972 in a remote
village of Bangladesh has turned into the largest development
organization in the world. Organizing the poor using
communities’ own human and material resources,
BRAC catalyzes lasting change, creating an ecosystem in which
the poor have the chance to seize control of their own lives. We do
this with a holistic development approach geared toward inclusion,
using tools like microfinance, education, healthcare, legal
services, community empowerment, social enterprises and BRAC
University. Our work now touches the lives of an estimated 135
million people, with staff and BRAC-trained entrepreneurs numbering
in the hundreds of thousands, a global movement bringing change to
12 countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.